Be certain to check out two significant historical shows that close this
weekend. There's Hilda Morris's show of small sculpture and sumi ink drawings at Laura Russo Gallery and the excellent Milton Wilson and his peers at Pulliam Deffenbaugh to check out... (more)

The Portland Art Museum
is open free of charge today and yes you can take advantage of it even if your
day job keeps you occupied during office hours, the Museum is open till 8:00 PM
on Thursdays and Fridays.

But the most exciting works are some of the pieces on loan. The show stopper
is Mark Rothko's "Homage to Matisse" (lent by an anonymous donor)
it's an essential work that needs to be included in any serious Rothko retrospective
and the single most important artwork residing in the Pacific Northwest right
now, yes it set an auction record for Rothko late last year.

Other highlights are an early Untitled Donald Judd lent by the Miller Meigs
collection. It's absolutely extra nice with its vermilion red color and placement
near an Agnes Martin.

Then there is the wonderful Hans Hofmann that really adds something to the
Abstract Expressionist room.

This Fourth of July, Sam Gould and the members of Red76 present you with an opportunity to experience an auditory glimpse into the war in Iraq. Entitled Bring the War Home, it is the closing project for a three-month residency the group held at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. Bring The War Home is a simple action set into motion to help remind Americans of the war in Iraq on the Fourth of July, and provoke discussion on the topic. Utilizing audio and video soldiers have recorded, Red76 has created a sound collage formatted into a downloadable MP3. Download this MP3 and play it outdoors as you feast on your hotdogs and down your PBRs. Remind yourself and your neighbors what those fireworks are all about.

As an art group with sometimes changing members, Red76 seeks to create installations, performances and events that constantly point to the outside world, creating “an atmosphere wherein the public may become hyper aware of their surroundings and their day-to-day activities”. Established in 2000, Red76 have produced projects locally, nationally, and internationally. To learn more about Red76 and their latest project, click here.

The heat of summer is clearly in Portland and so begins the slowing of the art season. That must be why I can’t seem to find much of interest for this week’s Weekly Web Round-up. I've got a couple of articles and a couple of activities for you to do while enjoying the lowered temperatures to come.

IDP:
I was thinking about what we discussed earlier about the new structure of information, and I noticed in one of your sculptures you made this connection between Punk Rock and a Viking ship. This is one of those associations that couldn't normally exist in a linear structure but clearly Punk Rock culture may have some Viking undertones.

MDJ:
That piece was really a suicide piece.

IDP:
It was a funeral pyre, right?

MDJ:
Well, it wasn't historically accurate, but I'm not even concerned with that, I'm concerned with maybe the Hollywood representation of Vikings. Basically I had come to the point where I realized I was fulfilling someone else's legacy of making art. I was operating within this formal strategy that was completely developed by my predecessors. You know from Modrian to Reinhardt to Philip Guston to Jonathan Lasker. Basically what they were making were super-narrative abstract structures. I realized that what I was doing was something that was not entirely a part of my generation, and that my ideas and creativity were constantly struggling against this. I wanted to put it all to rest, so I started making this funeral vessel for my own ideas and it took the form of this very heroic funeral practice. Of course the whole idea is pure Hollywood myth, there would be no artifacts of these ships if they had all been set on fire and pushed out to sea. I would say that that definitely didn't happen, but I wasn't as concerned with that. I was more concerned with heroic death and how it was represented in the media. I wanted to focus on death in relationship to all of this iconography. The sail refers exactly to a pattern from a specific Mondrian painting, and that leads in to the idea that these modern icons have narrative potential.

IDP:
That seems pretty radical to think of Mondrian as having narrative potential.

MDJ:
But it is! We've gone there! It's on clothing, it's on swatches, it's on furniture!

IDP:
Regardless of what Mondrian intended, the work has acquired a narrative.

MDJ:
Yes, and that's the world that we live in. I think of the Brancusi heads I'm making now, they are stacked up like cannonballs. The original sculpture was called the Sleeping Muse, and its eyes are closed, but in my version their eyes are wide open! The Sleeping Muse has been awoken from its slumber of the last 83 years. It's a statement about modernity to think of Brancusi used as a cannonball. We are at the tail-end of the industrial revolution, and that thing that was calm and banal is essentially being used to knock you out.

IDP:
I wanted to ask you about your interest in Bosch and Breugel.... (more)

PICA artist-in-residence Matthew Day Jackson wants you to eat some hot dogs and add your voice to his project on Tuesday June 27 from 5-8pm.

During the bbq he is inviting you to his studio to record your "sung" version of an air raid siren. These recordings will be incorporated into one of his pieces on view this Fall as part of TBA 06.
Hang out or participate at this recording session and bbq.